Do walls work?published at 17:03 Greenwich Mean Time 6 November 2016
"We are going to build the wall!", wails Donald Trump.
The wall, the wall, the wall.
The Wall.
The US-Mexico border wall has become a totem for the Trump campaign, an almost mythical symbol of the plan to Make America Great Again. But do walls work?
Journalist Tom Vanderbilt has written a long and interesting piece for the New York Times on the psychology and history of walls.
Worth a read here, external.
Quote MessageNo one really knows what the Wall is — neither its physical manifestation nor, more important, the policies needed to undergird its construction — but that hardly matters. For whether there ever will be an actual wall or not, it already exists as an idea, a piece of political theater, as a metaphor.
Tom Vanderbilt